Platforms

Last week, the DOJ and Google filed their respective witness lists and the exhibit lists for the remedy phase of the ad tech antitrust trial. Lots of familiar faces!

Web publishers are seeing revenue and traffic evaporate thanks to AI searches; LG Ads is finally preparing to go public; and women’s dating safety app Tea has some shady marketing practices.

Walmart has some new rules for third-party sellers; WPP wins Mastercard; and marketers should get into VTubers.

Last month, Spotify began making podcast inventory available programmatically, which is something buyers have been asking for, says Spotify’s Chloe Wix.

The competitive set has shifted and it’s stacked against independent DSPs. But, instead of chasing what competitors already own, TTD can own what they can’t: trust.

Walmart Connect’s deal with The Trade Desk isn’t so exclusive anymore; Amazon is competing with everyone except publishers; and Meta’s chatbots don’t exactly inspire confidence in the company’s ability to deliver effective AI tools.

When The Trade Desk sneezes, ad tech catches a cold.

Today’s biggest retail events are noisy, fast-moving and fiercely competitive. From back-to-school time and Prime Day to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the entire holiday shopping season, success comes down to securing attention before the rush begins.

Data brokers de-index their opt-outs; Meta is still the go-to for influencer ads; and Perplexity offers to buy Chrome.

Product review site HouseFresh bounced back from losing 91% of its Google traffic last year. Here’s how it’s pivoting in response to stiffer affiliate marketing competition and zero-click AI search.

The ad tech startup Vaudit, founded last year by Mike Hahn, aims to automate the process of campaign reconciliation atop major ad platforms.

Sometimes, price can itself be promotional marketing; Reddit is no longer playing nice; and AI scrapers are reshaping the web in another way.

New social media content moderation policies will enable connections with audiences that reflect a broader range of perspectives, expand inventory, and provide opportunities for contextual alignment.

Creative agencies are trying to adapt to AI’s sudden invasion of their turf; it’s a sunny day for TikTok travel influencers; and publishers have more than just Google’s AI overviews to worry about.

Why sue Google now, when so many years have passed? Because “the pattern of anticompetitive behavior continues,” OpenX CEO John Gentry tells AdExchanger.

OpenX filed a lawsuit against Google over its anticompetitive practices. And HyphaMetrics claimed victory against Nielsen in court over a patent lawsuit.

The SSP is betting on the DOJ’s antitrust remedies, plus closer relationships with agencies, DSPs and mid-sized advertisers, to help it eat some of Google’s lunch.

The New York Times’ growth rate blows other large news companies out of the water; Shopify’s shares leapt by 20% after an upbeat Q2 earnings report; and Google’s AI Overviews may or may not be causing web traffic to plummet, depending who you ask.

RE/MAX gets into the retail media game; Meta loses a class-action lawsuit over how it handled period-tracking data; and the IAB Tech Lab unveils its ad delivery playbook for live events.

People Inc. – the former Dotdash Meredith – is fighting on multiple fronts to keep its business growing as Google Search declines precipitously as a source of referral traffic.

CleanTap, an ad tech startup launched by the founder of Method Media Intelligence, wants to separate the wheat from the chaff in CTV by serving as a curation layer between DSPs and SSPs.

Agentio’s AI connects advertisers with relevant content creators through an automated bidding process, similar to the programmatic system.

As the quality of answer engines improves, people will click through to publisher websites less often. The solution isn’t to wage war against AI. It’s time to build a sustainable future for all stakeholders.

Coinbase is getting into ads; Etsy can’t rely on search ads for very long; and Zuckerberg wants to buy AI companies.

Change can be bumpy. From The Trade Desk’s Solimar-to-Kokai transition to Nielsen’s transition to its Big Data + Panel offering, we go inside customers’ challenges with these two transforming platforms.

My YouTube creator obsession has me fascinated by an ongoing trend I’ve noticed in the CTV industry: A lot of companies that produce free ad-supported channels rely on content that already exists on YouTube.

While Reddit’s ad business is ascendent, it’s still working on a strategy for getting the most out of its generative AI deals.

NBCU’s streaming losses were down to $100 million in Q2 from $348 million year-over-year, representing significant progress as the platform nears break-even.

Meta is making a massive investment in AI because “we have a conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do,” Mark Zuckerberg told investors.

SaaS companies are abandoning interoperability in search of more revenue; Spotify’s ad business is growing slower than expected; and sports is an upfronts winner for Disney and NBCU.